News & Updates from Voyage Manager

Voyage Manager releases the Voyage Immigration service. Voyage Immigration helps companies and individuals comply with international immigration rules. The service monitors the number of days travellers spend in countries and visa regions, ensuring that travellers to not breach visa and immigration rules.

Breaching visa and immigration rules can have severe consequences, including large fines, deportation from a country or region, or denial of entry into a country or region. All of these outcomes are disruptive to travel and costly for the company and traveller.

Countries and visa regions are becoming stricter on visa and immigration violations, leading to travellers refusing to travel, due to the increased risk of denied entry.

The new Immigration module allows administrators to get an overview of pending immigration issues, as well as drill down into any traveller's visa and immigration profile. Administrators can see the number of days spent in any country or visa area, which visas travellers have and how long they have left on the visas. They can also view the data trail of where travellers have been and which days they have been in each jurisdiction.

Through the My Travel module travellers can their immigration details, in the same way as administrators can. Travellers can also verify that the data stored in the system is accurate and correct.

Immigration App

The Immigration app is available for Android and iOS based smartphones. The apps synchronize with the portal, giving travellers a complete overview of their days in country and region. The home page on the apps displays their current country or visa area, their residency status and the number of days left until they will occur a breach. The Overview screen provides a breakdown of days in all areas, with details on the visa rules. The calendar shows the location of the traveller on each day, and the passport view shows the details of all of the traveller's passports.

Download the Immigration app from the app stores.

Notification Service

The notification service notifies travellers and administrators by email when travellers approach and when they breach immigration rules.

The Case: The successful implementation of Voyage Manager’s travel tracking system by the International Office at the University of Aberdeen in 2014, after receiving a positive recommendation from Glasgow University.

The University of Aberdeen felt the need to have tools in place to ensure the safety and well being of staff and students when travelling abroad.

The need arose with members of the International Office department having themselves experienced volatile situations out in the field, as well as having been informed of third party encounters with dangerous situations overseas, including hearing from academics that had been shot at.

With the risk that high, they could not afford to rely on traditional communication avenues to keep track of faculty and university attendees, and decided to raise their levels of security to be less passive and more continually in touch with their whereabouts.

“What is fascinating to me is that our perceptions of risk are often unconsciously very biased...we would think nothing would happen.”

The Transformation: Having seen a number of incidents occur that could easily have escalated, the university felt compelled to question both its duty of care and the protocols it had put in place.

Alongside accepting its own responsibilities, it required measures that were more robust than human nature, removing the need to rely on people remembering to keep the university informed via a text message, Whatsapp group or email whenever they were able to.

Thanks to features such as daily automated requests for status updates and consensual location tracking, the university felt that Voyage Manager addressed the fundamental problem of being able to proactively check on a person’s safety through simple-to-use, live notification software.

“Voyage Manager offered something totally different, yet was so in tune with our needs and concerns.”

From the University of Aberdeen’s perspective, they had a consolidated and secure source of information, aggregating updates on members of the university who were travelling abroad from multiple data sources. They were also pleased with being able to configure the Voyage Manager system to suit their needs and help them navigate multiple time zones.

They found Voyage Manager easy to implement and intuitive to use.

“The system is efficient and useful to our organisation. It was a nice reassurance to offer to our team and their next of kin. We feel empowered having the Voyage Manager system in place because we have access to a lot of security information. The more armed we are with flashpoints, in theory, the better prepared we should always be.”

A Real-Time Difference

Voyage Manager opens a fundamental discussion about the nature of risk and who ultimately manages the risk. It poses difficult questions. “If a grave situation occurs when I am on a work trip, whose fault is it? Is it my boss’s fault, is it mine, or my attackers?”

The looming question remains - what have we done to mitigate risk? Establishments may not be able to bullet-proof themselves, but this case illuminates how much things can improve when each party accepts their role in mitigating risk to the best of their ability.

“We want to be the absolute industry leaders by having the system in place to maintain and monitor the safety and security of our staff, and Voyage Manager allows us to do that with tools that we did not have access to before.”

Key system outcomes for The University of Aberdeen:

Mitigates risk and liability to the best of their ability

Ensures teams’ and students’ safety and wellbeing

Automates interactions, reducing reliance on human nature

Saves time for travellers and operations team

Removes unnecessary worries

“Working with John is brilliant. Fundamentally he understands the nature of our job and because he understands what we do and the places we go to, he understands the benefits of the system to us, and that makes a massive difference.”

The Case: Building an active and trusted travel tracking system to monitor marine acquisition and data gathering trips.

Before an acquisition by CGG in 2013, Fugro GeoTeam was based in Oslo, Norway. They specialised in marine acquisition, which involved gathering data from the sea floor and looking for oil and gas resources mainly on the West coast of Nigeria or the East coast of Tanzania in Africa.

There were sixty crew members, of which thirty on-boarded and thirty off-boarded every month. With half the crew swapping over that regularly, there was frequent travelling between the vessel and the homes of the crew, situated in various countries and cities around the world.

“At that time we were already thinking it would be good to have a travel tracking system in place which would save us a lot of hassle, time, and unnecessary worries for the families of the crew members. We were glad when Voyage Manager’s team approached us.”

The Transformation: With so much to and fro, Fugro GeoTeam decided to enable itself with a reliable travel tracking system. Monitoring the crew’s movements meant the company could notify support staff of a trip’s status as it was in progress.

“John and his team knew our company’s problems. Their caring attitude about our business and its nature meant it was easy to start working with them. We found it very easy to implement Voyage Manager into our business. The system had this very intuitive user interface, we didn’t need a course in order to learn it. The great thing was that it was so simple.”

Fugro GeoTeam work with oil and gas companies. This is a sector that is strongly scrutinised in light of safety and environmental issues, so naturally clients would ask what processes were in place to protect travelling crew members and what procedures are followed when something happens.

“Having a system in place that we could trust allowed us to monitor our crew. Voyage Manager contributed to us building our credibility and reputation as a company.”

Voyage manager also opened doors to newer more efficient practices, enabling teams with the ability to create and submit documentation in an automated fashion.

“We also realised that having knowledge was key. This solution allowed us to be ahead of the game in both dangerous situations as well as small easy tasks, such as a no show flight or a delayed flight. A much more effective business practice.”

A Game Changer

Essentially, Voyage Manager, empowered the entire team. Having travel itineraries on cell phones, wider access to relevant data, and a notification system that could provide alerts or SOS capabilities when something out of the ordinary opened, a new communication channel throughout the company, therefore allowing each facet of Fugro GeoTeam to better fulfil its individual goals.

Key system outcomes for the Fugro GeoTeam:

Saves a lot of hassle, time and unnecessary worries

Contributes to building our company’s credibility and reputation

Automates creation and submission of documentation

Allows to be ahead of the game

Improves efficiency of business practices

“The biggest fans of Voyage Manager were the Health, Safety and Environment department and crewing manager, they were very fond of this system. Employees liked to be protected and feel safe on the job, and were relieved knowing that they are safe being untracked during personal time."

With GDPR taking effect as of the 25th of May 2018, data privacy is now at the front of every company's mind.

At Voyage manager we are strong belivers in people's right to privacy, which is why, in 2015 we introduced the world's first anonymous travel tracker. We developed anonymous travel tracking to help companies comply with their duty of care requirements while at the same time giving travellers and employees the privacy they want. Our anonymous travel tracker tracks where travellers are, while hiding their identity. When a disaster or incident occurs the client can disable anonymity so that security staff can respond to the traveller. Once the issue has been resolved, anonymity is re-enabled.

Interest in anonymous travel tracking has grown exponentially over the last year as companies realize the benefits of anonymous tracking. Travellers are more likely to support and engage with a tracking platform that preserves their anonymity.

In today’s ever-expanding global regulatory environment, it is imperative that organizations implement a consistent process for collecting and managing employee travel and location information to address employee security, tax, and immigration related concerns, along with a broad number of corporate risk, permanent establishment and compliance issues.

To respond to this growing need, MSI has partnered with Voyage Manager to leverage their technologies and processes in order to meet the compliance and duty of care requirements of corporations worldwide.

“We believe our partnership with Voyage Manager, allows us to bring the most comprehensive employee travel tracking and data management solution to the marketplace today ” said Timm Runnion, CEO of MSI. “This solution provides standardized processes and technology which can be applied enterprise wide, eliminating the redundancies inherent when providing necessary information to multiple downstream service companies and globally to governmental tax and immigration departments.”

MSI Global Talent Solutions LLC is a professional services organization that focuses on helping organizations to grow compete and globalize. Through our compliance support businesses, MSI Global Immigration and MSI Global Compensation and Tax Administration, we are also able to seamlessly interpret the employee travel data into mission critical services designed to proactively keep their employees compliant and to avoid any unnecessary security risks that may result from their travel activities.

Voyage Manager CEO John Scott says "We are delighted and excited to be working closely with MSI and their team and we look forward to the opportunities this partnership will bring to Voyage Manager, MSI and our clients."

We are exhibiting at the Duty of Care conference in London next week. Please come by our stand or join us at the "Managing and mitigating the tax liability" round table discussion that we are chairing.

About the conferenceWith global threat levels involving terrorism, extreme weather and civil wars rising, we have seen a dramatic shift in the corporate travel risk landscape over the past couple of years. Companies are now preparing for scenarios such as bomb threats in European hotels which not so long ago barely featured on the radar. Yet understanding the real risks and your travellers’ exposure to them can sometimes be confusing when the media has an impact on your travellers’ fear and anxiety, pushing the threat of terrorism as a traveller concern to the forefront of our minds.

The concept of duty of care as it relates to travel risk management is a widely used term and many organisations now have all encompassing travel risk management programmes to ensure the safety and well-being of their staff.

By attending this conference, delegates will be able to hear the latest advice on risks posed to workers travelling overseas and assess whether their own in-house travel and risk procedures are up to date. Delegates will be able to ensure they adequately understand the legal implications and liabilities of managing overseas workers and that they are meeting their Duty of Care requirements. The conference will provide an excellent opportunity to network with peers, swap ideas and best practice and meet face to face the providers who are offering solutions in this area.